David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

Articles About Web Development

20/08/08 - Set Staggered Aims

In the spur of the moment, it can seem logical to launch everything on one site at the same time. For instance, a voucher code site isn't quite the same with just chocolate merchants vouchers listed.

Or is it? More

31/07/08 - Integrate Wordpress and Price Tapestry With Ease

Do you run a Wordpress blog with one of Brian Gardner's Revolution themes? Would you like to run a price comparison script along side it, both sharing a similar skin so visitors don't feel like they've jumped sites when they switch scripts?

Fear not as I've added two Price Tapestry Templates that look almost identical to Brian's templates (with his permission of course - thanks Brian!).

Take a look below for some screenshots of the two templates side by side. More

26/06/08 - Coding Websites Is Like Cooking Food

We're always being warned off some sort of food. This is bad for you and so is that. Don't even think about the other!

There's always some sort of nasty chemical or ingredient that is had for you: artificial colours, flavourings and hydrogenated fats for a start.

So what has this got to do with websites? Well for a start if you use a ready-built script off the shelf, there could be stuff lurking about in it that you do not know about. More

24/06/08 - Want A Free Holiday? It's Easy and I'll Show You How

This is the third (first, second) and final post in my mini-series on the excellent incentive being offered by Sunshine. As it stands, my site Orlando Florida Holiday has a 1 in 6 chance of winning. That's right, I could win a holiday easily worth £2,000 simply because 6 of us have entered.

I'm extremely surprised by the response to this competition. I've put other incentive-chasing on hold for a couple of weeks and cranked out this beast of a site. Anyway, I'm not forcing you to enter (it's better for me if you don't) but in case you want to know a bit more about how I set up my Orlando site, read on. More

19/06/08 - Win A Free Holiday Using Price Tapestry

Sunshine.co.uk are offering a 'free' holiday (free flights, free airport transfers and free accommodation) to a very lucky winner. There's talk of a Sunshine baseball cap and a t-shirt for the winner to take on holiday!

The holiday is an opportunity for you to familiarise yourself with a particular place and either extend or create fresh unique content to help promote Sunshine and help rank better in the search engines. When it comes to holiday's, there is nothing better than actual photos and video clips.

I'm entering a separate website but I just wanted to show you how easy it is to set up a travel website using tools from Sunshine.co.uk and Price Tapestry. More

27/05/08 - Remember To Target The Correct Market

I was in Cardiff on Sunday (taking advantage of the all-day park and ride for £3 - much cheaper than pay and display parking in Cardiff itself and takes 5 minutes on the bus either way) and was stopped by a salesman.

I tend to avoid people like this who stand in the middle of a town/city centre trying to get you to buy something or have a leaflet for this, that or the other. Anyhow, I didn't spot this one and he pounced.

"How much do you spend on your mobile?"

Given I use a landline 99.9% of the time, I only go through a fiver here and there. That's what I responded with.

"Well for £35 a month, you can have a new phone...."

Eh? I spend a fiver here or there and you are trying to sell me a £35 a month contract? More

21/05/08 - Look For A Gap

There's literally millions of gaps in the affiliate marketing market. In fact that's true for every market in business. It's simply a case of identifying that gap and exploiting it to the best of your capabilities.

Here's some examples (real world and on the interweb) of people exploiting a gap in the market. More

17/04/08 - New Amazon Warehouse and BBC News Videos

Firstly. yesterday saw the official opening of Amazon's new warehouse in Swansea. This is Amazon's fourth UK warehouse in addition to the ones in Marston Gate (Milton Keynes), Glenrothes (Fife) and Gourock (Inverclyde).


(Image care of BBC News)

This made the local news but didn't seem to appear on the national news. However, it does appear on the BBC News website, along with a new feature of the Beeb. More

16/04/08 - Camcorder Price Comparison

Since I switched the back-end of Compare Sat Nav to an automatic price comparison (freeing up an incredibly large amount of time) I've wanted to launch something similar. Enter Compare Camcorder Deals!

It uses the same sort of front-end and the same back-end as CSN, just a different data file. It's taken a couple of days to swap the front end to read 'camcorders' instead of 'sat nav' and it's taken (and still is taking) a long time to compile the initial data file. More

19/03/08 - What A Complete Waste Of Time!

I've spent weeks hand crafting a new site. It's not live yet and the FTP server's playing the giddy goat which is why I am posting on here!

Anyhow, I've just found another site with near enough the exact same principle and topic as mine. It was only by luck I stumbled across it.

That means it's back to the drawing board to change the idea somewhat to avoid being hypocritical. More

06/02/08 - Split Up Your Sites

Sometimes a site can outgrow itself. Perhaps the navigation has become too complex or the subject material is no longer in line with the original aims.

In line with my last post (Web Development Lesson Care Of The Music Industry), I've got another practical example only this time with different videos! More

06/02/08 - Web Development Lesson Care Of The Music Industry

Here's a tip you can learn from the music industry. With each new release of a site, make sure you are moving forward. Standing still adds no value to your site, no value to the user experience and will not help you climb the search engine rankings.

Today's lesson comes from Rhianna, Akon, Michael Jackson and Manu Dibango. More

07/11/07 - Traffic, Links and Revenue

I had a creative spark and came up with this. Some of it is concerned with web development and some is concerned with PPC. More

07/11/07 - Open Source To Dave Source

I thought I'd post a bit about my progression in web development as part of a November "1 year old" special! The 1 year mark is on the 27th November 2007 and from now until then I want to provide a bit more background information about me, a bit about the project progress so far and a bit about the future.

Today's topic is about web development. More

01/11/07 - Plan Before You Action

I like to impart some wise words every now and then and today's tale is about the benefits of planning before you rush of and create websites. More

22/01/07 - What Came First - The Chicken or the Egg?

So, which is it? Is it the chicken so that it can lay eggs or was it the egg that resulted in the chicken?

If it was the egg, how was it made? If it was the chicken, where did it come from?

What's all this got to do with web development? More